Walking tour tells story of slave who ran away from George Washington

PORTSMOUTH, New Hampshire —A new book and a walking tour in New Hampshire are shedding light on a slave who ran away from George Washington and was never caught.

Twenty-two-year-old Ona Judge slipped away from Washington’s home in Philadelphia in 1796 and caught a boat to Portsmouth. Despite several attempts by Washington to recapture her, she remained free. She married, raised three children and died in 1848 in Greenland, New Hampshire.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s book Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge tells the story and has cast Washington’s role as a slave-owner in a new light as well. A tour has started that highlights several places associated with Judge in Portsmouth. Efforts are under way to fund a trolley that would take visitors out to Greenland.

The tour in Portsmouth starts with the wharf near Prescott Park, the focal point of the slave trade for much of the 1700s in Portsmouth.

Judge arrived on a ship called Nancy as the slave trade was in decline in New Hampshire.

From there, visitors walk past several historic homes that played a critical role in the neardecade Judge spent in the city, the church where she was married and the market where she was spotted by a family friend of the Washingtons — an event that almost led to her being captured.

“Her story, her life reflects this underdog story in the most underdoggish of ways,” said Dunbar, a Rutgers University history professor who is scheduled to give a lecture and book signing on Thursday at Keene College.

“She was technically human property and was owned by the most important family in the new nation,” Dunbar said.

“[Yet], she was able to carve out a life for herself … Ona’s story represents what many enslaved [individuals] wished, longed for, and that was a chance to be an independent person.”

The Ona Judge tour ends in Portsmouth, but Judge’s story continued on to Greenland.

Fearing that Washington’s men were closing in on her, Judge would flee in 1799 to the home of a free black family, Phillis and John Jacks, where she remained until she died in 1848. Washington would die several months later in 1799, followed several years after that by Martha Washington.

No one else would come for Judge, but that didn’t mean life was easy. She was impoverished, often depended upon charity and outlived her three children and husband.